Recession Requires A Focus on Revenue

It’s starting to become clear that beyond just storm clouds, we are in for a recession in Silicon Valley. Which I suppose means that the next bubble will be delayed a few more years.

We started our business in mid-2003, helping several small consulting and software firms who were struggling to recover from Silicon Valley’s nuclear winter of 2000-2 when local employment dropped 25% from the height of the dotcom era. So we are not worried that bootstrapping firms will suddenly stop needing customer development. And, although fewer folks may decide to quit their jobs to raise VC funds, some may still choose to launch a consulting career or a software startup and discover the need for bootstrapping.

Clearly expense control at VC backed companies is going to be increasingly the focus at board meetings. But bootstrapping firms are born with expense control, for the most part they can’t exist on “build it and they will come” business plans.

Most new software firms are looking at Software as a Service models for deployment. And SaaS has implications on the sales model and the salesperson’s job. If you are wrestling with these issues, you should consider attending a roundtable we have scheduled for tomorrow that will look at sales issues for SaaS firms. In particular how does SaaS change sales management, sales compensation, and selling strategies.

It’s over a lunch from 11:30 to 1pm at Plug and Play, 440 N Wolfe Rd Sunnyvale, California 94084.

You can Register here.

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